Managing Digital Resources in Libraries

Citation

Chawner, B. (2006), "Managing Digital Resources in Libraries", The Electronic Library, Vol. 24 No. 4, pp. 576-577. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470610689296

This collection of 13 papers covers a range of topics relevant to digital resources management: licensing (two papers), systems and software (five papers), special projects and histories (three papers), and opinions, research, and analysis (three papers). The two articles on licensing provide useful background information for people new to the field, though there is an emphasis on US legislation and its implications for licenses that may limit its relevance in other jurisdictions. Shipe's paper takes a novel approach by describing a fictitious case study of the license negotiation and review process when the NEIGH resource, invaluable for Houyhnhnm Studies, became available in electronic format. The names have been changed to protect the parties involved, and his use of humour to illustrate the issues associated with licenses, particularly when it is necessary to negotiate clauses, is particularly effective. The five articles on systems and software cover options for cataloguing electronic journals and how different libraries have provider access to e‐journals for their users. Most of the papers discuss what might be called “conventional” electronic journals, but one paper, by Koufogiannakis, Ryan, and Dahl, discusses e‐books published for PDAs, the issues they raise, and how the University of Alberta's Health Sciences Library has dealt with the challenges of lending them. Cuesta's paper presents a content analysis of North American academic library job advertisements to determine how library workflows and positions have changed in response to electronic resources. There is a name/subject index, and most of the articles include references. One point to note, though, is that many of the cases are now several years old (some refer to 2001 or 2002), and the projects discussed are likely to have changed in the intervening years. Fenner's introduction suggests that the papers were chosen to answer such practical questions as “how are librarians coping with digital resources?” and “does consortium membership provide the answer to funding problems, or does it force librarians to pay for content their users neither want nor need?”. Overall, this volume does a better job of answering the first question than the second, given the case‐based approach used in the majority of the papers. It will be particularly useful for people new to digital resources management, and is recommended for both professional and personal collections.